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New York

I set about visiting old haunts that summer, but soon realized few were left.

We had been gentrifiers, more humble and open than most, we assumed, and now our time to be called back into service had come again. There were surely other areas in premium metropolitan cultural centers out there that had lapsed to Negroes in the years after the Great War which remained affordable for the mostly white American middle class of 2015, and we’d have to go find one. He was, quite naturally, thinking about moving to LA, a cliché in the Brooklyn we were inhabiting, especially among the middle-class creatives who fashioned themselves as priced out, a sensation that inspired a cottage industry of Didion imposters writing “Goodbye to All That” imitations on the websites of once-veritable magazines. This is not, despite appearances, one of those. I remain too stubborn to read the writing on the wall.

There are many good reasons for citizens to understand the finer points of policymaking. But in this room, we were at our most powerful and effective when we put aside the urges to be experts (we are not) and to show off our sophisticated political analysis (we didn’t have one). The organization that had put together the lobbying meetings needed us to be warm bodies who live in the right districts, people willing to simply show up and say what we want.

Unless you’re a dog obsessive, you probably haven’t heard of the majority of breeds at Westminster. To help, owners lay out pamphlets about the histories of their breeds, information on how to care for them, and related décor, in addition to the dogs themselves, either placed on tables or below them, depending on size. With so many breeds competing for attention, novelty is a virtue. Any dog of Asian or Middle Eastern ancestry is liable to be dressed in a way that would make Edward Said turn in his grave.

In the sexual counterrevolution, Ginsberg was the antiporn Gettysburg — the battle that turned the tide.

Once in a while, my parents allow some critically authorized highbrow “erotic” periodical like Eros or Evergreen to breach our doorway. But they draw the line at Playboy, in spite of its long, left-leaning pieces by and about important men like Vladimir Nabokov and James Baldwin. Mom and Dad aren’t prudes, they’re snobs. They consider comics, Mad magazine—even mysteries—degraded forms of literature. What would they think of Man to Man? I don’t have to ask.

There are two New York sensibilities: Yankee and Met. If the teams’ fans aren’t divided by class—there are plenty of impoverished Yankees fans, if not that many well-heeled Mets fans—they’re divided in how they think of their city. The former are the New York of “New York, New York”; the aura of the new Yankee Stadium, with its wide moat between the nice seats and the not-so-nice, is that of Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps—expensive, bloated, and dumb.

Regrettable trends and eccentricities, which ought to have been lethal, instead became defining and enduring aspects of the scene. And some of the most noxious elements of New York hardcore—its reactionary ideology, the awkward mingling of skinhead and straight-edge versions of male aggression, the detours into religious mysticism—were not symptoms of decline but present from the beginning.

What happened in those years can’t be contained in a coda. Nor can it be credited with all the victories that came later — but it was an era in which AIDS activism began winning remarkable victories in the global arena, and the era in which the AIDS and LGBT agendas cleaved apart.

On this episode of the n+1 podcast, podcast editor Aaron Braun speaks with Jo Livingstone about intern labor in publishing. Mixed in with their conversation are excerpts from n+1’s Labor and Letters Symposium in April discussing the state of labor in publishing today. Nikil Saval moderates the Symposium panel, featuring guests Aaron Braun, Sarah Jaffe, Maxine Phillips, and Maida Rosenstein.

This new episode of the n+1 podcast celebrates the release of City by City. First, co-editor Stephen Squibb talks about the City by City project and why we love writing and reading about cities. Then, Brandon Harris discusses his essay on Bedford-Stuyvesant, the neighborhood’s cultural history, and gentrification in Brooklyn.

n+1 is a print and digital magazine of literature, culture, and politics published three times a year. We also post new online-only work several times each week and publish books expanding on the interests of the magazine.